Improve PPC Call Quality With Call Conversion Tracking

If phone calls drive sales for your business, you’re likely looking for ways to increase the number of quality calls to make your sales team happy. Implementing call tracking for your account is a crucial step for driving these quality call conversions. By combining call tracking insights with your PPC strategy, you can focus spend and account optimizations on areas that result in higher quality calls.

Why you need call tracking

While you can import and track calls from ads in AdWords, there are very few insights that you can gain from AdWords beyond pure call conversion volume. Within the platform, you are not able to see important call details, such as the duration of each individual call and what campaigns drove longer or shorter calls. Without these details, the optimizations that you can implement are limited.

By integrating call tracking software into your PPC efforts, you can work towards driving quality calls for your business. Call tracking software allows you to see which campaigns, ad groups, keywords, devices, and placements drove calls, as well as the durations of those calls.

How to determine what a quality call is for your business

Unless you are going to listen to every call recording (hopefully not), you will need to decide on a proxy for a “qualified” call. For many lead generation clients, a longer call duration is typically indicative of a quality call, meaning that caller is interested in the product and wants to learn more. As a business, you will have to determine how to segment call durations. To start, think about how long it usually takes your customers or your sales team to get the information they need to move into the next step of your sales funnel. For example, if you know your team needs a minimum of two minutes to ask the necessary questions to prospective callers, then you can set that as the first tier of desired call quality. Anything below two minutes would be considered poor quality.

While it differs from company to company, you will also want to take into consideration the number of repeat callers and the date and time of incoming calls when looking at your data. For example, if your call center is closed on weekends, you will want to evaluate weekend vs. weekday calls differently, or even take weekend data out altogether, since you would expect weekend call duration to be very short. If you find that there are a high number of repeat callers, you may also want to separate out how you look at new vs. repeat calls when you pull reporting.

Driving PPC results with call tracking data

So you have your call tracking software set up and have collected enough data to dig in – here is where the fun begins. When you combine call tracking learnings with PPC efforts, you will be able to determine which campaigns, ad groups, and keywords to increase investment in based on the percentage of valuable calls they drive. In a similar vein, you can also determine which PPC areas to pull back from. If you find that there are certain campaigns that consistently drive customer service-based calls, you can pull back investment in those areas.

As an example, after combining call tracking and PPC efforts for one account, we were able to drive a 46 percent increase in call duration and a 39 percent decrease in poor quality calls in the first four months. In terms of overall business impact, a 39 percent decrease in poor quality calls means that your sales team will spend less time on low quality leads and answering irrelevant phone calls. Your sales team will be happier, more efficient, and ready to focus on those quality callers. They can capitalize on that 46 percent increase in call duration and improve the bottom line.

As you look to mature your PPC efforts, don’t overlook the benefits of combining call tracking insights into your strategy. The more data you have on the valuable aspects that drive sales for your business, the more successful and efficient your advertising investment will be.